Rich tale includes famous Detroiters Sonny Eliot and ex-Tigers president Jim Campbell.

Clyde Riley is 88 years old now, long retired, living in Howell with his wife, Helen, but he has just done the people of Detroit and Michigan a great service by preserving the story of Hygrade Food Products and Ball Park Franks for the ages.

Riley, working with my friend and former Free Press columnist Doron Levin, has just published “Speaking Frankly: A Southern Boy’s Journey from Slaughterhouse to Creation of the World’s Top Hot Dog Brand.”

It’s a simple story, 126 pages in all, of an unassuming man, the first from an Alabama sharecropper’s family to graduate from high school.

Yet it is also a rich tale, populated by famous Detroiters of days past, including TV weatherman Sonny Eliot, longtime Detroit Tigers general manager Jim Campbell, public relations maven Bev Beltaire and political heavyweight Ed McNamara when he was mayor of Livonia.

Central to the plot, along with Riley himself, is the Ball Park hot dog, created in 1957 to boost sales to baseball fans at Tiger Stadium — and later transformed into a national brand by the W.B. Doner agency’s advertising tagline “they plump when you cook them.”

Riley was a young middle manager, barely 30 years old, at Hygrade when the Tiger Stadium opportunity arose.

He had worked as a teenager at the Dothan, Ala., slaughterhouse of Kingan & Co., an Indianapolis-based meat company, and hired on as a clerk there after a brief hitch in the Navy at the end of World War II. Kingan was acquired by Detroit-based Hygrade, and Riley — for his attention to details of production statistics — had caught the eye of of Hygrade President Hugo Slotkin.

In the mid-1950s, Campbell, a front office manager who would later become president of the Detroit Tigers in 1974, was looking for a new hot dog supplier and Slotkin believed Hygrade could gain prestige by making the dogs for Tiger fans. He asked his chief sausage maker, Gus Hauff, to create a tasty new hot dog.

Hauff added veal to the recipe and the company made them larger too — eight dogs to a pound instead of 10. Fans at the park loved them; the next challenge was to give them a new name and try to sell them at grocery stores for a premium price. Salesman Bill Willtsie came up with the name — Ball Park Franks — at a weekend Hygrade brainstorming meeting.

By the mid-1960s, Riley had been promoted to Michigan sales manager for Hygrade in Michigan, and the popular Sonny Eliot was pitching Ball Park and other Hygrade products on the airwaves. Sales were booming locally, and in 1965 Riley and Slotkin tasked W.B. Doner to come up with a strategy to vault the Ball Park brand to national prominence.

Doner wanted a catch phrase for why Ball Park franks were so special, for why people should pay extra for these hot dogs over the competition’s.

They pressed Hauff, the sausage maker, for the secret.

Gus talked about the beef trimmings, and making the veal emulsion leaner. No catchy jingle in that.

Finally when a Doner executive pushed him on why the Tigers chose his dog over a dozen others, Hauff blurted, “Because they plump when you cook them.”

A juggernaut was born. Ball Park Franks, with annual sales of about $565 million, leads all other hot dogs brands in sales today.

Riley rose through the ranks to become president of Hygrade in 1975, at age 48. He led the firm through a product tampering scare in 1982, when a woman complained of finding a razor blade in a Ball Park hot dog, local TV news reported on it and a flurry of copycat complaints followed. None were ever substantiated, and Ed McNamara, then Livonia mayor, presided over a “Livonia Loves Hygrade” week in support of the firm whose plant was in the city.

In 1989, when he was also chairman of the American Meat Institute, the industry’s trade association, Riley was instrumental in arranging the sale of Hygrade to the much larger foods conglomerate Sara Lee.

Sara Lee was interested primarily in the Ball Park brand and subsequently dismantled Hygrade’s older meatpacking operations. An era had ended. Riley stayed on in a largely ceremonial role for several years before easing into retirement.

Sara Lee split itself in two in 2012, and Ball Park Franks are now sold under the umbrella name of Hillshire Brands.

In “Speaking Frankly,” Riley, who kept a fairly low public profile during his years as a Hygrade executive, writes that he was a tad disappointed when the Wall Street Journal wrote a short piece about his promotion to the Hygrade presidency in 1975.

He wished that they hadn’t omitted the facts that he was one of the only CEOs of a publicly trade company without a college degree, and that he was the first of his family to complete high school.